The golden standard for disaster recovery service are high availability services. High availability services are disaster recovery services that provide zero or near zero recovery time. In other words, if a first system is providing a service to a client and the first system becomes unavailable, a second system is already online or quickly comes online to continue providing the service to the client without an intermediate loss of communications, loss of service, or loss of data for the client. While high availability services are the golden standard, such services come at great expense because high availability services are generally completely redundant systems, even though the redundant system exists for an event, i.e., a disaster, which is highly unlikely to occur.
The opposite extreme of high availability services in disaster recovery is backing up the bare minimum of a primary service, and when a disaster does occur, additional computing resources are gathered, initialized, and brought online. The minimalist implementation of a disaster recovery service is economical when compared to high availability services because all of the resources needed to provide the primary service are not acquired, organized, or existing in standby mode (an essentially unused state) while waiting for a disaster to occur. The obvious downside to the most economic approach of disaster recovery is a prolonged recovery time. Rather than a zero recovery time, most economic disaster recovery models can take several days to bring a service back online. In popular (e.g., Netflix) or important (e.g., Bank of America) services, a recovery time of several days would result in extremely unhappy customers.
What is needed is a method and system for providing disaster recovery services using elastic virtual computing resources, to economically provide disaster recovery services that approximate a high availability service.